Anonymity is no excuse for trollish behavior

Before I begin, let me just say this post contains no revolutionary ideas, no grand revelations that will make you think about WoW in a new way; it is really a form of catharsis for me, and thus may not fit the standards I hold my other philosophy posts to. It will probably not lead to any deep discussion in the comments section, and it probably won't inspire any new ideas in you, but that's the way it goes.

Still reading? Glad to see it. First of all, I am going to assume, at the risk of being horribly wrong, that you, the reader, are not a sociopath. I am going to assume that if I were to say that you should be generally courteous to the people you see in your daily life, that it is wrong to go out of your way to make their lives miserable, and that even if you can't see them as friends, you should try to see them as people, then you would simply read through without a speck of thought to the contrary. If, however, you are one of those people who thinks that we need a reason to be good to others, rather than one of those people who thinks we need a reason to not be good to others, then you may as well stop reading now, because this post is based on assumptions that we do not share.

Still reading? Thank goodness. I apologize for all of these warnings and all this seeming self-doubt, but I tend to get a bit nervous about defending a position when I don't justify the premises beforehand, and that's exactly what I am going to do now. What are those premises? I could go into a long list of them, but I shall stick with one that summarize the rest rather well: the Golden Rule. If you aren't familiar with this golden rule, then I'll give you my own version (I often find the other versions I read to be too schmaltzy, trite, or particular): If you like it when people do something for/to you, then do that thing for/to other people; if you don't like it when people do something for/to you, don't do that thing for/to other people. To paraphrase the Rabbi* Hillel, that is the whole of morality; everything else "is just commentary."

Now, even if you don't follow the Golden Rule in your everyday life, I'm sure you follow some basic sense of morality that prescribes that you treat others with respect and that you generally don't be a jerk. How frequently you follow that sense of morality is a different matter, but even if you break the rules, at least you are aware of them. It's simple ethics that if someone is human, they are worthy of some sort of respect (in most cases, at least). So, when you start playing WoW, surrounded by other players, it follows that since they are people too, they are worthy of this same respect. Simple, right?

I wish. If it were that simple, we wouldn't have WoW.com breakfast topics like the one that inspired this post. No, when you boot up WoW, rather than people acting like civil human beings, we get trade chat, ganking, and griefing. We get gear score/achievement checking and people yelling at new 80's for not having ICC epics in heroics. We get impatient DPS shouting "Gogogo" (no, really? I thought we got our emblems of frost by standing around doing nothing), healers refusing to heal DPS through forgivable mistakes because of the number who take avoidable damage and expect to be healed through it, and tanks chain-pulling faster than their healer might be able to keep up. Quite simply, we get jerks.

It has always frustrated me that the WoW community has degraded into what it has become. If anything, encountering someone else while playing WoW should make you want to be nicer to them. See, there's this thing called the Monkeysphere. The monkeysphere is an informal name for "the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people." Scientists studying our brains have determined that our monkeysphere is limited to 150 people. That means that we are only capable of seeing 150 people as real people at any given time. Our brains simply aren't capable of seeing every single person we see on a daily basis as a real person; unless they are important to us, we just see them as "one-dimensional bit characters."

What does this have to do with what we are discussing? The monkeysphere is the reason we are more comfortable being rude to strangers than to people we know; those strangers simply aren't people to us. How does someone enter your monkeysphere? Simply having something in common can be enough, though our monkeysphere is usually comprised solely of people we see on a regular basis. However, commonality can be enough if you are willing to expand your monkeysphere beyond a few dozen people. And guess what! Those people you play WoW with? You do have something in common with them; you both play WoW. Oftentimes, you'll have even more in common; you both want to finish a certain quest, you all want to finish a heroic, but failing that, you still have your common identity as a WoW player to help you see those you encounter in-game as people. Still, I suppose the fact that WoW has gotten as big as it has, as well as the spontaneous and temporary nature of most group activities, means that at some point, the number of people we encounter in-game had to exceed our monkeysphere.

Still, I have encountered twenty trolls in WoW for every a-hole I have encountered in the real world; where does this imbalance come from? Aside from the G.I.F.T, there are two elements that can be reasonably blamed for this increase in antisocial behavior in the WoW population: anonymity and lack of repercussions. We aren't as rude to people in the real world as we are in WoW because those people in the real world can see our faces and recognize us again, and we don't want to face the potential consequences for our prospective antisocial behavior. Both of those elements are severely reduced in WoW, hence what we see on a daily basis. I know I'm not hitting on anything new by claiming that anonymity and lack of repercussions lead to the behavior we see in WoW, but that's not the main point I'm trying to make. The main point I want to make is this: anonymity and lack of repercussions are piss-poor excuses for trollish behavior.

Neither of these excuses should need to be debunked if you simply believe in the Golden Rule, but I highly doubt most trolls follow the Golden Rule, so so much for that. Let's start with anonymity. The anonymity that WoW provides comes from the fact that people won't recognize you as the perpetrator of the trollish behavior in question. It's similar to how people can be rude to people they don't see frequently in real life: people who we see frequently are within our monkeysphere, so because we are more comfortable being rude to people outside of our monkeysphere, we are more comfortable being rude to people we don't know. In other words, somewhere along the line, we got this idea in our head that it's ok to be rude to someone if you won't see them again. From a practical standpoint, that may be true, but it's a very perverse sentiment, regardless. The idea that strangers aren't worth our respect really denies them a bit of their humanity; this may be the monkeysphere itself at work, but it is our responsibility as human beings who live in as large of a community as we do to overcome the monkeysphere, to surpass it. If we cannot do that, then our only choice is to regress technologically and sociologically until we never have to encounter more than 150 people in a day.

As for the lack of repercussions? Well, by reading this, you agreed that being courteous to people is a good thing, and that rule applies whether there are consequences or not. If being courteous is its own reward (and I can say from personal experience that it is), then that alone should be enough to make you courteous towards other players, regardless of whether there are negative consequences for doing otherwise.

Still, both of these excuses are just that; excuses. When I say excuses, I mean that in the sense of pretenses. I think the real reason trolling exists is because the people behind those trolling avatars simply don't respect other people. In real life, they hide their lack of respect out of fear of the repercussions that that will follow it, but when you take the possibility of those repercussions away, that's when you get trade chat. The issue isn't anonymity and lack of repercussions, then; the issue is onymity (the opposite of anonymity) and the presence of repercussions in the real world, for some people only subdue their trollish tendencies in real life because of these discouragements.

Now, don't think I haven't forgotten the very blog post I wrote a few weeks ago. Most of you are probably sitting there in agreement as you read this, and I doubt I will change the mind of the odd troll who may happen upon this page. So why do I write this? If anything, it can prepare you, the considerate reader, for the day you may argue with a troll, for the day you may have the opportunity to change his mind, the day he listens to reason, if only you can provide that reason. Maybe that day will never come, but if it does, you might just be a bit more prepared now.

*Though I may be quoting a Jewish commentator, the Golden Rule can be found in almost every religion world-wide, and even if you don't follow any religion, it's a very nice cliffnotes version of ethics that is simple to follow (though rarely easy).